What can I say about this result? I'm bereft. It isn't even a result so awful that the Lib Dems could sit by the sidelines and let everyone else sort out the mess the country is in. That, at least, would be easy. In fact, just to make things even more galling, we seem to have actually increased our share of the vote to a level that we would have been delighted with a month ago. What a cruel result.

What we have instead is a big muddle and one which is unlikely to even be sorted out by holding another election. If elections using this broken system are going to throw up such random results, it isn't merely that it is manifestly unfair; it no longer serves as a viable mechanism for deciding on who should govern the country.

It would appear that the enthusiasm that both the pollsters and Lib Dem canvassers were detecting was only skin deep. The once consolation appears to be that for the most part the young people who said they were voting Lib Dem and didn't stayed at home rather than switch to another party. There is at least a base out there waiting to be inspired and mobilised. Even at the height of the campaign it was clear that the Lib Dems were pretty much relying on them to organise themselves. Clearly this was expecting too much.

For a brief moment, it looked as if Nick Clegg had managed to capture the public mood in a similar way to how Obama did in 2008. In fact, a closer analogy would be Howard Dean's bid for the Democratic nomination in 2004. Like Clegg, Dean found himself at the centre of an enthusiastic youth movement that he didn't really know what to do with. If, like Dean (who went on to become chair of the Democratic National Congress and played a crucial role in that party's electoral successes in 2006 and 2008), the Lib Dems spend the next couple of years harnessing that potential, we could yet turn this moment of despair into something positive and lasting.

But that is scant consolation to those candidates and former MPs who were defeated this morning. It's been a heavy blow and yet the party only has a few hours to recover before the thorny talks to decide who will be sitting in Downing Street must begin. Some difficult decisions will have to be taken this weekend; what the outcome will be is anybody's guess.